Someone asked me what to charge for a thing they had never sold.

They had been sitting on that one question for weeks.

Not building. Not writing. Sitting.

Every number felt wrong to them.

Go high and nobody buys.

Go low and you look cheap, and you are stuck down there forever.

So the launch date moved. Then it moved again.

I asked them to say a number out loud, right now, no thinking.

They said one.

Then they went quiet. "But that is probably too much, no?"

There it was.

The whole problem, tucked onto the end of a sentence.

This was never a pricing problem.

It was a saying-it-out-loud problem.

And here is the part nobody tells you about a first launch:

You have no data.

None. Zero. Not a single sale to reason from.

So every pricing framework, every calculator, every "what does the market pay" exercise is quietly doing the same job.

It is walking you toward a number you can say without flinching.

That is the entire function.

Not accuracy. Confidence.

The fastest route there is not a spreadsheet at all.

It is a bracket.

Name a number so high that it makes you laugh out loud.

Then name one so low that it embarrasses you.

Then close in from both ends until they meet.

You will feel the exact moment the number stops fighting you.

That one. That is your launch price.

Which means the thing you have been agonising over is not decidable yet.

You are trying to calculate an answer that only real selling can hand you.

The market has the real number.

It will give it to you the moment you ask people for money.

Fast, honestly, and for free.

But it cannot tell you a thing while the number is still only in your head.

So stop deciding.

Pick the number you can say to a stranger's face without your voice going up at the end of it.

Then go and find the stranger.

Because a price you flinch at gets sabotaged by the way you say it. Every single time.

Your buyer is not really hearing the number you named.

They are hearing whether you believe it yourself.

The Number Gets Easy When The Offer Gets Small

Naming a price is brutal when the promise is huge and blurry. The Sideways Offer is a short course that shows you how to find the one thing your buyer is desperate for, deliver only that, in full, and stop. A small promise with an obvious result is a promise that prices itself.

• Price with a spine: how to set a number without racing the cheapest person in your market

• The belief test: the three things your offer needs before anyone takes the promise seriously

• The angle change: what turns “I will think about it” into “can you help me?”

Fix My Offer

Question: what is the number you keep almost saying out loud?

Leave a comment

— Martin

Build a life you don't need to escape from.

PS: if you keep rewriting the price instead of launching, the offer is the thing to fix first.

See the sideways move →

The exact system I use to automate my business →

How I get free traffic and buyers on autopilot →

My journey: how I built a business that runs without me →

Someone buys from you today.

You check when they joined.

That date is old. Months old, sometimes years old.

So you tell yourself the usual thing.

They needed time with me.

And you carry on sending, waiting for the rest of them to ripen.

I read it that way for years.

Patience as a strategy.

The plan was to show up and let the calendar do the selling.

Then I went looking for what the buyers had in common.

And I stopped looking at join dates.

I looked at what buyers had gone through before they bought.

Opened. Watched. Read to the end.

The buyers were not the oldest names on my list.

They were the ones who had been through a pile of my material.

Meanwhile the list was full of people who joined ages ago and consumed almost nothing.

Those people were not warming up.

They were parked.

Here is the takeaway.

Nobody buys from a calendar.

People buy once they have consumed a lot of you.

Consumption is the variable. The join date just sits there.

And that changes what a sales cycle even is.

It stops being a thing you wait out.

It becomes a thing you can shorten.

Which means the waiting is something you built, and you can take it back.

Look at what a new subscriber gets in their first thirty days.

One email a week?

A newsletter about your Tuesday?

That is a trickle, and a trickle takes years to fill anything.

Nobody binges you by accident.

You already own the material that would fill it faster.

The post that got the replies.

The video people finished.

The breakdown that made someone book a call with you.

All of it sitting in an archive nobody new will ever dig through.

So sequence it.

Put your best thirty days in front of every person who joins.

In order. On purpose.

Same material, same you, arranged so they get through it fast.

That is a sales cycle you count in weeks instead of years.

You stop waiting for people.

You decide how fast they get there.

Consumption Only Pays If The Offer Is Easy To Believe

The Sideways Offer is a short video course on building one small offer that fixes the single thing keeping your buyer awake, and delivers it fast. Most offers ask a person to believe a long chain of promises before they pay, and every link is somewhere to say no. Lay the offer on its side and the yes gets easy, because the proof arrives early.

• The 3 components any offer needs before a stranger believes a word of it

• The angle change that turns "I will think about it" into "can you help me?"

• How to price without racing the cheapest person in your market

Fix My Offer

Question: what is the best thing you have ever published that a new subscriber will never see?

Leave a comment

— Martin

Build a life you don't need to escape from.

PS: the fastest way to shorten the wait is to hand them one small thing they can say yes to today.

See the sideways move →

The exact system I use to automate my business →

How I get free traffic and buyers on autopilot →

My journey: how I built a business that runs without me →

My ad account went down on a Tuesday.

No warning.

No human to call.

Just a red box telling me I had broken a rule, and no clue which rule it was.

I refreshed that page about nine times, which is the grown up version of pressing a lift button harder.

So I did what you do.

I opened every ad and started stripping it down.

The claims went first.

Then the numbers.

Last to go was anything that even sounded like a promise.

By the end my copy was so plain it could have been selling a stapler. (Career highlight, honestly.)

That took the entire day.

The account came back.

I did not celebrate. I had produced nothing all day except permission to keep going.

Then that same week I scrolled my own feed and saw ads running claims ten times stronger than anything I had ever put on a page.

Same platform. Same rules. Nobody touched them.

Here is what it means: the rules are not applied evenly, and you do not get a vote.

The suspension was survivable.

The powerlessness was the part that cost me.

Because when a platform is the road between you and your buyers, a stranger can shut that road on any given Tuesday.

And the whole day you spend getting back on it produces nothing.

No new customer.

No new email address.

Nothing you can bank.

Just you, working for free to get back onto a road you never owned in the first place.

You are renting a road too.

Maybe it is Instagram. Maybe it is a marketplace. Maybe it is one ad account quietly carrying every sale you will make this month.

It works right now, so it starts to feel like yours.

It is borrowed.

Ask yourself the only question that actually matters here.

If that account vanished tonight, could you still reach the people who buy from you tomorrow morning?

If the answer is no, that is your real risk. Bigger than your conversion rate. Bigger than your ad spend.

So rent the platforms. Rent them hard. Reach is exactly what they are FOR.

But keep the list, the relationship and the offer somewhere nobody can switch off.

Reach you rent can be taken back on any Tuesday.

The people who actually chose to hear from you cannot.

An Offer People Chase Is The Only Road You Own

The Sideways Offer is a short course that shows you how to build one small offer people say yes to quickly, instead of a big program they have to believe six separate things about before they buy. It works for anyone who sells a service. You take the tall offer you have now, lay it on its side, and deliver only the piece that is keeping your buyer awake at night.

• The 3 components any offer needs before a stranger believes a word of it

• The application funnel that brings buyers to you daily without a single sales call

• The angle change that turns I will think about it into can you help me

Fix My Offer

Question: if your biggest platform switched you off tonight, how would you reach your buyers tomorrow morning?

Leave a comment

— Martin

Build a life you don't need to escape from.

PS: if the reach is there and almost nobody buys, look hard at the offer before you go and buy more traffic.

See the sideways move →

The exact system I use to automate my business →

How I get free traffic and buyers on autopilot →

My journey: how I built a business that runs without me →

A hundred days.

That is where the podcast sits today.

A hundred episodes in a row. No gap, no skipped morning.

And here is the part nobody expects when they hear that number.

I hate attention.

Genuinely. The less people know about me, the better.

So when I decided to publish daily, I had one choice to make.

Video was the obvious answer.

Video is what performs. Video is what everybody tells you to do.

I picked a microphone instead.

No face. No camera. No lighting setup I would have to look at every morning.

Just me talking, alone, in a room nobody sees.

That was the whole decision. It took about a minute.

And that minute is the reason the streak exists.

Point is:

Consistency is a design decision.

You make it once, on the day you pick the format.

Everything after that is just Tuesday.

Which means the people who quit were never lazy.

They picked something that costs them a little bit of pain every time they sit down.

Then they blamed their discipline when they stopped showing up.

You have one of these somewhere in your business right now.

Maybe it is the content.

Maybe it is the thing you sell.

So ask an honest question about it:

could you still deliver it on your worst day?

Not your best week. Not the week you feel sharp and the calendar is empty.

The bad one. The kid is sick, you slept badly, nothing is funny.

If the answer is no, the format is what changes.

That is the whole fix.

Because the version you survive beats the perfect one you abandon.

Every time.

The Offer You Can Still Deliver On A Bad Day

Most offers are built to impress. Big promise, long program, and a delivery load that quietly eats your whole week. Sideways is a short course that shows you how to lay that tall offer on its side and sell the one small piece your buyer already lies awake about, which happens to be the piece you could deliver in your sleep.

• The “Get vs Do” equation that decides whether your message actually lands

• How to price without becoming the cheapest person in your market

• Copy and paste offer templates that have sold $10,000 programs

Show Me The Angle

Question: What are you still forcing yourself to do the hard way because somebody told you it performs better?

Leave a comment

— Martin

Build a life you don't need to escape from.

PS: the offer you dread delivering always ends the streak.

Show me the lighter version →

The exact system I use to automate my business →

How I get free traffic and buyers on autopilot →

My journey: how I built a business that runs without me →

I used to run my list like a bouncer.

Someone replied, asked a question, clicked twice in one week.

That person got my attention.

Everyone else went into a mental bin marked "not serious".

I never said it out loud.

But that is exactly what I was doing.

I chased the hands in the air and quietly wrote off the rest.

Every single week.

And honestly, it felt smart.

Focus on the buyers, right?

Then the buyers started arriving from the bin.

People who never replied to anything.

Never clicked a thing I remember.

They had been reading quietly for a long time, and then one ordinary Tuesday they were ready.

Nothing about them had changed except the timing.

That is when it hit me.

I had been sorting people into buyers and non buyers, and the second category does not exist.

There are only people whose window is open today, and people whose window is shut today.

Same person. Different Tuesday.

Point is: readiness is a moment. It is not a personality.

And the only thing that decides whether a shut window buys from you later is whether you were still there when it opened.

So look at where your effort actually went this week.

Almost all of it landed on the handful of people who looked ready.

The follow ups. The calls. The offers. The energy.

Everyone else got nothing, because they never raised a hand.

So why does the pipeline keep drying up on you?

Because you keep fishing the same small pond.

Most of the money you will ever make is sitting in the group you wrote off.

They are not cold.

They are early.

Which means you need two systems, not just one.

One that converts the people who are ready today.

And one that keeps you useful to everyone else until their moment finally arrives.

Skip the second and you are not building a business.

You are harvesting the same small field over and over, then wondering why each season comes back thinner.

Give The Early Ones Something Small To Say Yes To

Sideways is a short video course for anyone whose offer is not converting. It shows you how to take the big program you have been pushing and lay it on its side, so you deliver the one thing your buyer already wants fixed instead of a long promise they have to talk themselves into. Small enough to believe is also small enough to say yes to on the day their window finally opens.

• The Get vs Do equation that decides whether your message lands or slides straight past them

• How to price your offer without racing the cheapest person in your market to the bottom

• Copy-paste offer templates you can fill in tonight and put in front of someone tomorrow

Fix My Offer

Question: how many people have been quietly reading your stuff for months without ever raising a hand, and what are you actually sending them right now?

Leave a comment

— Martin

Build a life you don't need to escape from.

PS: the people who are not ready today are most of the people who will ever pay you.

Lay your offer on its side →

The exact system I use to automate my business →

How I get free traffic and buyers on autopilot →

My journey: how I built a business that runs without me →

I posted something useful almost every single day for a year.

Not lazy stuff either.

Real teaching. The things I actually do, given away for free.

And people responded.

They replied. They saved posts. A few sent me long messages about how much one post had helped them.

And then the same sentence kept coming back to me.

"I'm not sure it would work for someone like me."

Every time.

Warm audience. Educated audience. Nobody buying.

For months I read that as a traffic problem. So I posted more. Posted better. Went harder.

The sentence did not move one inch.

Recognise that?

Then I tried something boring instead.

I pulled up my last month of published content and dropped every piece into one of four columns.

Do I like you.

Do you have a real method.

Would it work for someone like me.

What actually happens next.

One column filled up fast.

The other three had been sitting empty for a year.

See, your buyer is not asking one question. They're asking four, in order, and they ask them quietly.

Teaching only answers the second one.

I answered it over and over, brilliantly, while three other doors stayed shut.

Point is: a warm audience that never buys is rarely short on information. It's short on the other three answers.

Now go look at your own last month.

Take every post, every email and every video, then drop each into a column.

Four columns. Connection, teaching, proof and invitation.

Want to know what you'll find?

The teaching column is heavy. Of course it is. That's the one you're comfortable with, the one you can do all day long without ever feeling like a salesman.

Connection has a few in it. Proof has almost nothing.

And invitation is empty.

So why do the people who love your stuff never once ask to work with you?

They never got permission. You never gave it.

But here is the part that nobody warns you about.

That invitation column is empty for a reason, and the reason is not shyness.

You can't invite someone into a thing you don't quite believe is an easy yes for them.

So you go back to teaching, because it feels safer.

You Need Something Small Enough To Invite People Into

The Sideways Coaching Offer is a short video course for coaches whose offer is not converting. It shows you how to take the big program you have been trying to sell and lay it on its side, so that you deliver the ONE thing keeping your buyer awake at night instead of a long promise nobody quite believes. Make it that small and that specific, and the invitation stops feeling like a pitch at all.

• The three components a coaching offer needs before a stranger believes a word of it

• The angle change that turns “I'll think about it” into “can you help me”

• The application funnel that brings clients to you without a single sales call

Show Me The Angle

Question: Which of the four columns is emptiest in your last month of content, and what has been stopping you from filling it?

Leave a comment

— Martin

Build a life you don't need to escape from.

PS: if your audience is warm and still quiet, the gap is almost never in what you teach them.

See the sideways move →

The exact system I use to automate my business →

How I get free traffic and buyers on autopilot →

My journey: how I built a business that runs without me →

A friend of mine called me up properly annoyed. He sold websites. I sold websites. He had just cut his prices in half to stay in the game, and I was charging three times what he was charging, without having to argue about it once.

He wanted to know what I was doing differently. The answer had nothing to do with the websites.

My Friend Had Competitors. I Did Not.

He was chasing the same clients as everybody else. Businesses that have been running for twenty five years. People who already have a website, already have someone who built it, and already have four other agencies sitting in their inbox this month. You cannot win that room on anything except price, so he dropped his price.

I was going somewhere else entirely. I was talking to people who had registered a domain the day before.

Think about what registering a domain actually means. Somebody sat down, decided this was really happening, and paid for the name. They have nothing yet. No social media, no website, no SEO, no phone line, no office. They need all of it at once, and nobody on earth knows they exist yet.

So I wrote a small tool for myself that checked which domains had been registered the previous day and put them in a list. It was built for me and nobody else, so it was held together with tape. It has collected close to 32 million contacts since I switched it on. Yesterday it handed over 200,000 new ones.

I was not selling better than my friend. I was just there first.

The Business That Starts Before Anyone Knows You Exist

Everything above comes out of running a business the same way: get there early, keep the offer simple, and let the machine do the part that repeats. The Lifestyle Business Machine is that whole thing built for you, and seven days from now it is either running or it is not. The days off go on the calendar before the work does.

Build My Lifestyle Business

The Offer That Saves Them Money Sells Itself

Pick a profession. My client picked personal trainers, and they are a good example: the ones who suddenly could not visit anybody at home lost most of their business in weeks. They know they need to be online. They have no idea how to get there.

Most people would open with the biggest thing they sell. I do the opposite. The first thing I tell them is that they do not need a website.

They are braced for it, remember. Their friend Bob paid twenty grand for one. They think they will have to learn to program. They think it will take two years and cost them an arm and a leg. Then somebody tells them to skip the whole thing, put up a funnel instead, be live tomorrow, three hundred dollars.

That is not a pitch landing on them. That is relief. Nobody haggles with the person who just saved them nineteen thousand seven hundred dollars.

Your foot in the door should be the offer that takes weight off them, not the one with the biggest number on it.

You Do Not Have To Build Any Of It

The obvious objection is that you do not know how to build funnels. You do not need to. ClickFunnels, LeadPages, Systeme, all of them ship with templates already inside. Those templates are in there because somebody tested them and they converted. Take one, change the name, change the phone number, done. If you would rather not touch it, pay somebody on Fiverr to tweak it.

The second objection is that the client will spot that it is a template. They will not. Ask your grandmother whether she has heard of ClickFunnels. Ask your mother. Ask your uncle and your auntie. The number of people who know these tools exist is tiny, and your client is not one of them.

This is the same reason I stopped building custom sites years ago. Custom means being asked whether the button in the top left is the color of a unicorn hair, then being asked to change it back the following week. So I moved to templates and I say it plainly: this is what you get, your name goes here, your number goes there. It is faster for me and far cheaper for them, and they still say yes.

One more thing while you are in there. Be an affiliate for whatever tool it runs on. If the client pays a hundred a month, around forty of that comes back to you every month for as long as they stay. Multiply that by the number of clients and it stops being pocket change.

None of this needs inventing. It is already built and already tested.

Set It Up Once, Then Stop Touching It

Here is the part that makes it a business instead of a job. Search the day's list for your profession. You might pull five hundred personal trainers out of it, maybe a thousand. Import them into a list. That list is wired to an email sequence.

Then you tell the system how many to contact per day. Say three hundred. Not you contacting them. The system. By the end of the month you have opened conversations with nine thousand people who just launched a business and need everything, and you have not sent a single email by hand.

Do not hammer them, though. The sequence goes out, waits thirteen days, comes back around day thirty, then again on day sixty. These people just started a business. They are working out accounting and a CRM and whether they even need a support desk. Give them room and be there when they surface.

And the first sale is only ever the first sale. Once you have solved the thing they were dreading, they come back for the membership site, the accounting software, the traffic. They start asking what else you would recommend.

I built this for my own business first. It only turned into a product because my friends saw what I was charging and asked me how.

Everything in this letter already exists. The people who need you registered their domains yesterday. The templates are sitting inside tools you could sign up for this afternoon. The sequences send themselves while you are asleep.

The only part nobody has automated yet is the part where you go and do it. There is no version of this where you know where the leads are, know what to sell them, know how to deliver it, and still have a good reason to wait.

The Machine That Builds The Business Around Your Life

Not another course to watch. Seven days from now it is either running or it is not.

Everyone else is building a business they will need a holiday from. This one goes the other way round: the days off go on the calendar first, and the work is built around what is left. Most people spend six months on videos and webinars and still have nothing to sell. In seven days you have a lifestyle business already running.

Strategy always outwits tools. The tool is never the plan, the plan decides which tool you even need. So the offer gets picked, not brainstormed, and the pages are live and the emails are written before the week is out.

What's inside:

• Your offer, found and built around who you actually are: picked, not brainstormed

• Ninety percent of the work done for you: the pages, the funnel, the launch plan

• Emails, social copy and sales pages written for you: in your voice, ready to send

• Client deliverables in one click: branded per client

• A coach who knows your offer: awake whenever you are

• Cancel anytime, from inside the account: no year to sign, nothing to watch first

What it actually buys is the middle of a Tuesday. Peace of mind is the most precious thing you get, not money. You choose your clients and you refuse the annoying ones.

Early Beats Big. Every Single Time.

Build My Lifestyle Business

Question: Who in your market registered their domain this week and has not heard from a single person yet?

Leave a comment

— Martin

Build a life you don’t need to escape from.

P.S. Funny thing about the traffic system I keep mentioning: the version my team installs for clients is not a lighter copy. Same engine that powers Martin's own properties. If you want to see whether your offer qualifies, the application page explains it.

Check if your offer qualifies

The exact system I use to automate my business →

How I get free traffic and buyers on autopilot →

My journey: how I built a business that runs without me →

The best hire I ever made was a man who did not exist.

I gave him a name. I gave him an email address on my own domain. I gave him a LinkedIn profile, a Facebook page, even a Google Plus account. He was the business development manager at a company that had exactly two human beings in it, and he won us contracts I could not win as myself.

Here is where the idea came from.

Nature Sorted This Out Long Before You Did

There is a scale for predators. It runs from zero to five, and five is the thing at the top of the food chain that eats everybody. Humans sit at five. We only sit at five because of technology. Drop me in the woods with no tools and a few tigers and lions around and the number goes down to about three point two. Mother Nature always finds a way to balance things out.

When an animal meets something bigger than it is, it has three moves.

It can fight. I would not recommend it, because the thing in front of it got that big for a reason and the odds of walking away are thin. It can run, which is what a bird does the second you look at it, because a bird takes no chances with anybody. Or it can inflate.

The puffer fish blows itself up until it looks like a completely different animal. It stays that way for a good while afterwards because the whole episode stresses it out. And quite often the predator just leaves. No fight needed. Nobody gets hurt.

I have been using the third move in business since my first company. Looking bigger is not lying about what you can do. It buys you the chance to prove it.

The Business That Does Not Need To Look Bigger

Everything you just read came out of building businesses that had to work long before they looked impressive. The Lifestyle Business Machine skips the six months you would spend making it look like something and gets a real offer live inside seven days. The days off go on the calendar before the work does.

Build My Lifestyle Business

Signing Your Own Emails Is Quietly Costing You The Contract

Nobody turns you down because you cannot do the work. They turn you down because you have not done it before.

Think about how stupid that is for a second. On your first day at the job you do today, you had no experience either. You did it anyway, and you have been doing it for five or ten years since. Not having experience never meant you were incapable of something. It only ever meant nobody had given you the chance yet. But it still costs you the deal, and the company they pick instead is often worse than you. It just looks heavier on paper.

Back when my first business was me and my business partner and nobody else, I signed every outreach email as the CEO. Everybody loves that word. It looks great in a signature, it sounds great in a nightclub, look at me, I run the company.

Now read what it actually tells the person on the other end. If the CEO is the one writing operational emails, there is nobody else in the building. A CEO should not be doing this. So the reader decides this is the smallest company on the planet and quietly moves on to the next name on the list.

My degree was in international negotiation. The whole specialisation rests on one idea: never walk into a room without something to push with. I had nothing to push with. So I built it.

The Man Who Was Never Born

I read the tip in The Four Hour Work Week and then took it somewhere else. I created a business development manager. He was not real. Making his email address on my own domain took about two seconds. Then I built him a LinkedIn, a Facebook profile and a Google Plus page, because people genuinely do type your name in to check whether you are who you say you are.

He did two jobs for me.

The first was hierarchy. A company with a business development manager has levels, and levels read as a real business. The second was the negotiating position, and that one earned its keep every single week. A supplier quotes me a hundred. I push to ninety. I push to eighty. Then I get to say the sentence I could never say as the CEO: I love what you do, I just have to check with my CEO on this. I come back the next day, ask for another five percent, and get it.

That mattered because of how the money worked. A client paid me a hundred to deliver something. I paid a builder forty to actually make it. Every point I took off that forty landed in my pocket. The man who did not exist made the cost side cheaper and the client side easier at the same time.

The person who has to check with somebody always negotiates better than the person who decides.

Eight Departments, One Inbox

Then I did the same thing to the website. In the back end of your domain you can create email addresses in seconds. So I made one for sales, one for marketing, one for PR, one for support, and a few more besides, and I put all of them on the contact page under their own little headings.

Every single one of them redirected into the same inbox. Mine. From the outside it looked like a company with three hundred people in it, sorted into departments, each with its own team. It was one guy with a laptop.

Phone numbers work the same way. A Skype number cost me around forty pounds a year at the time, call it fifty dollars. One for sales, one for support, one for whichever department you feel like inventing, all of them ringing the same phone. And you pick the country, which matters far more than people expect. Sit in Germany chasing American clients with a German number on your site and nobody calls. Put a local number up and they call.

I still keep a French number and I have not lived in France for years. When I was doing a round the world trip, sitting in Bora Bora and Tahiti and Fiji, people could ring that French landline and pay nothing for the call, because calling a landline in France is free. It cost me nothing on my side either, because it arrived over the internet. The only problem is that I do not enjoy phone calls much, so I have never handed that number to many people.

None of this works if the one man show is the actual product. If your whole pitch is that it is just you, that you travel alone, that you are not some corporate machine, then inflating fights everything you are trying to build. I do not do any of it now. On the blog and here, it is me, and that is the entire point. Consultants can go either way, because a consultant is hired to be spoken to, and nobody cares whether there are three hundred of you behind the door.

I also want to be clear about why I did it. Not for the ego, and not to trick anybody into buying something I could not deliver. I did it because being judged on your size instead of your ability is a rotten way to lose work you are genuinely good at. Google did not start with three thousand employees. They started in a garage. Somebody gave them the chance to be judged on the work first.

That is all inflating ever buys you. The meeting. What happens inside the meeting is still entirely on you.

The Machine That Builds The Business Around Your Life

Not another course to watch. Seven days from now it is either running or it is not.

Everyone else is building a business they will need a holiday from. This one goes the other way round: the days off go on the calendar first, and the work is built around what is left. Most people spend six months on videos and webinars and still have nothing to sell. In seven days you have a lifestyle business already running.

Strategy always outwits tools. The tool is never the plan, the plan decides which tool you even need. So the offer gets picked, not brainstormed, and the pages are live and the emails are written before the week is out.

What's inside:

• Your offer, found and built around who you actually are: picked, not brainstormed

• Ninety percent of the work done for you: the pages, the funnel, the launch plan

• Emails, social copy and sales pages written for you: in your voice, ready to send

• Client deliverables in one click: branded per client

• A coach who knows your offer: awake whenever you are

• Cancel anytime, from inside the account: no year to sign, nothing to watch first

What it actually buys is the middle of a Tuesday. Peace of mind is the most precious thing you get, not money. You choose your clients and you refuse the annoying ones.

Small On Paper. Free In Real Life.

Build My Lifestyle Business

Question: What have you talked yourself out of going after because you decided you were too small for it?

Leave a comment

— Martin

Build a life you don’t need to escape from.

P.S. There was a moment, years ago, when I looked at what an hour of my life sold for and felt sick. Not because the number was small, but because I had agreed to it. That moment became the first book in the Rich or Free series, and the rest followed: every mindset shift and money move that took me from selling hours to owning my time. If you have ever done that same math at your desk and hated the answer, the series starts exactly there.

The story behind book one is here if you want it

The exact system I use to automate my business →

How I get free traffic and buyers on autopilot →

My journey: how I built a business that runs without me →

Bora Bora. I framed the shot before I had properly looked at the water. Turquoise, palm shadow, the whole postcard, and a caption underneath about how I was just trying to stay alive out here.

Then I sat with my phone and watched the comments land. Jesus Christ, he is living the life. That was the point. I made that photo for strangers.

The Photo I Made For Strangers

I was on my trip around the world at the time and the business was running without me, so the photo was not a lie exactly. It was reality with everything inconvenient cropped out. You got the fifteen seconds where the water was perfect. You did not get the rest of that day, or the week before it, or anything that was going on in my head.

I bring it up because I still catch myself on the other side of it. I look at someone and think I wish that was mine. I am not going to sit here and pretend I am above it, I go through the same thing. The only difference now is that I take two seconds before the feeling settles, and those two seconds change the whole thing.

If I had to sum Instagram up in one sentence it would be this. My fake life is better than your fake life. That is the game everyone is playing. Watch someone shooting a story and you can see the mechanism working, the face goes up the second the camera goes up. Five minutes earlier they might have been crying.

You are not looking at a life. You are looking at something built to be looked at.

The Life Goes On The Calendar First

Everything I write here comes out of building the business around the life instead of the other way round. That is what The Lifestyle Business Machine builds, and seven days from now it is either running or it is not. The days off go on the calendar before the work does.

Build My Lifestyle Business

You Cannot Order One Slice Of Someone's Life

Here is where it gets interesting. When you say you want somebody's life, you have to take all of it. Not the beach day. All of it.

Start with their relationships. Maybe they burned every bridge on the way up. Maybe the people around them are only there because of who they are right now, and the day that goes, so do they. That does not photograph well, so you never see it.

Then take the fame, if there is any. I heard an interview with Justin Bieber once, I knew nothing about the guy, and he said half the year he is on tour, and while he is on tour he is stuck in his hotel room, because the second he steps out there are three thousand people waiting downstairs. Half a year in hotel rooms. And people wonder why these guys end up depressed. I am introverted. I want to be left alone. That life would break me inside a week.

I know someone who is obsessed with another person's feed. Obsessed is the correct word, it reached the point where I did not want the conversation anymore. So I told them what I actually knew about the person they were envying. Depression. Panic attacks. Sitting there at the end of every month working out how the rent gets paid. Doing work they hate to cover it. None of that makes the grid.

It is a package deal. You do not get to pick the slices.

The Business You Envy Comes With Its Clients

Same trick with businesses. I see a guy with an agency that is clearly pumping money and my first reaction is the normal human one. Then I picture what my Tuesday would look like inside that agency, and I want no part of it.

I am allergic to dealing with clients. I keep very few of them, on purpose, not because I cannot get them. The moment you take a client on you have taken on a boss. Your day gets run by somebody else's expectations, somebody else's fears, somebody else's frustrations, and not one of those is yours. Handling your own is already a full day of work.

You will tell me to hire people for that part. Sure. Now I have staff, and staff is its own job.

The money looks the same from the outside. Someone tells you they make a hundred grand a month. They might be spending a hundred and two, and now they have a cash flow problem you will never hear about. Someone shows you ten million in real estate. What I see is a lot of debt. People post their ad dashboards with the revenue number blown up, and when you look at what is going in the other end, they are losing money on those ads.

Revenue is a headline. What sits under it never makes the post.

Did That Happen In My Boat?

I listened to a book a while back with a story I have not been able to shake. Olympic final, rowing. There was a false start, one crew kicked up chaos about it, the complaining started, and half the field lost their heads over it. Afterwards a journalist asked one of the rowers whether all that had thrown his focus.

He asked one question back. Did that happen in my boat?

He was not being clever. He genuinely did not care. It was not in his boat, so it was not his to carry.

Stay in your lane sounds like a slogan until you see what it is actually protecting you from. Your lane looks messy to you because you are standing in it. Every other lane looks clean because you are standing outside it. That is the entire illusion and it works on everybody, including me.

There is exactly one day on this planet you get to watch for twenty four hours, and it is yours. Even the parts you would rather not have seen, you saw them. Everybody else hands you a few minutes on camera. You are seeing me right now for the length of this email. You are not seeing the rest of my day.

So here is the only thing worth taking from this. Wish you had your life. Somebody out there is looking at a fraction of it and wishing exactly that.

Know a coach or a consultant who would want the system behind all of this? Refer them and you make money while they get the machine.

Want it for yourself, same link, just pick the buyer option. Here it is.

The Machine That Builds The Business Around Your Life

Not another course to watch. Seven days from now it is either running or it is not.

Everyone else is building a business they will need a holiday from. This one goes the other way round: the days off go on the calendar first, and the work is built around what is left. Most people spend six months on videos and webinars and still have nothing to sell. In seven days you have a lifestyle business already running.

Strategy always outwits tools. The tool is never the plan, the plan decides which tool you even need. So the offer gets picked, not brainstormed, and the pages are live and the emails are written before the week is out.

What's inside:

• Your offer, found and built around who you actually are: picked, not brainstormed

• Ninety percent of the work done for you: the pages, the funnel, the launch plan

• Emails, social copy and sales pages written for you: in your voice, ready to send

• Client deliverables in one click: branded per client

• A coach who knows your offer: awake whenever you are

• Cancel anytime, from inside the account: no year to sign, nothing to watch first

What it actually buys is the middle of a Tuesday. Peace of mind is the most precious thing you get, not money. You choose your clients and you refuse the annoying ones.

A Business You Never Need To Escape

Build My Lifestyle Business

Question: Whose life have you been measuring yours against, and how much of it have you actually seen?

Leave a comment

— Martin

Build a life you don’t need to escape from.

P.S. The ADHD Life OS in my Gumroad store started as the board I built to stop losing my own week. 26 plug-and-play Notion and spreadsheet systems: ADHD Life OS, finance, freelancing, creator systems and more. If your brain also refuses to hold a calendar, the build is here.

The board that runs my week: growthhacker1.

https://growthhacker1.gumroad.com/?utm_source=house&utm_medium=substack&utm_campaign=gumroad-books&utm_content=ps

The exact system I use to automate my business →

How I get free traffic and buyers on autopilot →

My journey: how I built a business that runs without me →

It was midnight when I finally sat down to record this one. I had spent the whole day making videos, after two weeks of making videos, and I was done. The only thing keeping me in the chair was knowing that you make a video once and it keeps paying you forever.

Earlier that same day I had been talking to a consultant. Good guy, good money, completely convinced he was trapped.

The Guy Who Told Me He Was Stuck

He told me he liked what I do and wished he could do the same thing. Then came the but. He is a consultant. He has to be there in the morning, and he is with the client until six, and that is the job. So he is stuck. He said it like it was a fact about the universe.

It is not. What happens is that people look at one thing only, the ultimate level. The guy sitting at home scratching his butt while the money comes in. That is the picture in everyone's head, and next to their Tuesday it looks like a different planet. So they file it under not for me and go back to work.

What they miss is that there are levels in between.

Part of this is that a lot of people are still living in the industrial age inside their own heads while the digital age happens around them. In the industrial age you needed a banker to hand you money, then a plant, then a pile of employees, then all the overheads that come with them. That is why people tell you business is risky. It is the only reference they have. Then a few go too far the other way, see only the most extreme version of the digital thing, decide they could never do that, and stay exactly where they are.

Stuck is almost never a fact. It is usually a missing middle.

The Machine For The Level You Keep Skipping

The reason most people stay in the one to one trap is that building the thing that would replace it looks like six months of work they do not have. The Lifestyle Business Machine does that part for you: the offer, the pages, the funnel, the emails, running inside a week instead of a season. The days off go on the calendar before the work does.

Build My Lifestyle Business

The Level Nobody Wants To Talk About

The first step up from one to one is not some clever funnel. It is the room.

You already give the information away one person at a time. Give the same information to twenty people at once. Or a hundred. Same day, same effort, same material coming out of your mouth. Now count what changed. They will not pay what a private client pays, so you are not multiplying by twenty. You are multiplying by five, six, seven. For the same work.

The extra cost is admin. Finding a venue, chasing the details, all the parts that are not you teaching. I am horrible at that kind of planning. Genuinely bad at it. So I would take a slice of what the room brings in and pay somebody to handle it, which is exactly what most people who run these things end up doing anyway.

Here is the part I would think hard about. Plenty of people who go this route end up on planes to random cities, living in hotels, when they hate hotels. They swapped a cage for a slightly bigger cage. If more time is the whole reason you are doing this, build it so people come to you instead. Your town, your schedule. You will make less than if you flew to them. Expect that, then ask yourself what you were actually optimising for.

You do not have to do the exact thing I do to get the thing I have.

Record It Once. Sell It Until Infinity.

Then there is the top level, and it is not complicated. You record what you know one time and you sell it from then on.

Nobody travels. Not you, not them. A hundred thousand people could go through it at the same time from anywhere on the planet and your calendar stays empty. I am not flying to Mexico because somebody in Guatemala wants to buy my course. They go online, they buy it, they get it.

Recording it is annoying. I will not pretend otherwise. You have to be far more descriptive than you are in a room, because nobody can raise a hand. You open this, you click the green button there, now this is what happens next. It is tedious. But if it is something you already explain every single day, this is just the last time you ever have to explain it.

The objection I hear is always the same one. My clients are old school, they want a human. Fine. Then sell them the part they actually care about. They go at their own pace. They go when they want, including when you are asleep. If I have insomnia at four in the morning and I can open the thing and use it, that is worth real money to me. And they can go back over the same material as many times as they like without paying again, instead of hearing you say sure, we can cover that once more, that will be another session.

Old school is a preference, not a wall.

Put The One On One Last, Not First

None of this means the private work is bad. It works. Someone has your full attention, everything gets shaped to them, they ask whatever they want. That is why people pay for it. The problem is only what happens when it is the only thing you sell.

So invert the order. The recorded thing goes first, open to everybody, the basics and the principles that move somebody forward on their own. From there, the ones who want more come to an event. Higher ticket, they meet people like them, they can ask their questions in person. And only then, at the very end, the private work at the price it deserves.

Look at what that last position does. Everybody who reaches you one to one has already paid twice and worked through the material. They are serious before they arrive. You are not handing your calendar to whoever emailed first for pennies. That final level stops being the thing that owns your week and starts being the thing that protects it.

People keep telling me I should be coaching. There is a lot of money in it, you could charge this much an hour, you talk for a living anyway. And the honest answer is that my time is worth more to me than that extra money. Not forever, maybe. If the business went broke I would look at it differently, and everybody has a price. Hand me ten million dollars and I would probably find my calendar. For now, my freedom carries a higher price tag than the hourly rate.

It was midnight and I was tired from a day of recording things I only ever have to record once. That is the whole trick. Being stuck is not a personality, and it is not your industry either. It is a structure, and you are allowed to change it.

The Machine That Builds The Business Around Your Life

Not another course to watch. Seven days from now it is either running or it is not.

Everyone else is building a business they will need a holiday from. This one goes the other way round: the days off go on the calendar first, and the work is built around what is left. Most people spend six months on videos and webinars and still have nothing to sell. In seven days you have a lifestyle business already running.

Strategy always outwits tools. The tool is never the plan, the plan decides which tool you even need. So the offer gets picked, not brainstormed, and the pages are live and the emails are written before the week is out.

What's inside:

• Your offer, found and built around who you actually are: picked, not brainstormed

• Ninety percent of the work done for you: the pages, the funnel, the launch plan

• Emails, social copy and sales pages written for you: in your voice, ready to send

• Client deliverables in one click: branded per client

• A coach who knows your offer: awake whenever you are

• Cancel anytime, from inside the account: no year to sign, nothing to watch first

What it actually buys is the middle of a Tuesday. Peace of mind is the most precious thing you get, not money. You choose your clients and you refuse the annoying ones.

Build The Level Above The One You Are On

Build My Lifestyle Business

Question: Which level are you actually on right now, and what is stopping you from building the one above it?

Leave a comment

— Martin

Build a life you don’t need to escape from.

P.S. The lesson that changed how I use AI: stop asking it for favors, start giving it a job. A prompt is a favor. A role with inputs, a checklist and a definition of done is an employee. That one shift is why my most hated tasks now run without me. I turned each of those roles into a short book, one hire per book, in the Your AI Workforce series. The build notes are all in there if you want them.

Browse the roles

The exact system I use to automate my business →

How I get free traffic and buyers on autopilot →

My journey: how I built a business that runs without me →

People ask me all the time which pitch I use. Which channel. Which automation is running behind it.

Almost nobody asks the one question that moves the number more than any of those. Who are you pointing all of it at?

You can change your answer to that today. You do not have to rewrite a single line of your pitch, and you do not have to become a better salesperson.

Selling To Everybody Means Selling To Nobody

Most people start at the very top, with something so general that nobody recognises themselves in it. It could be a man. It could be a woman. It could be a dog, a duck, a dead person. If you are trying to sell to everybody then you are selling to nobody, and every single conversion becomes brutal work.

So you have heard the fix a thousand times. The riches are in the niches. Narrow it down, pick a market, talk to those people specifically instead of shouting at a crowd.

That is a real step forward and you should take it. It is also where almost everybody stops.

And the niche most people choose is the one that will fight them hardest.

Picking Who You Sell To Is The Free Half

Choosing who you point the offer at costs you nothing and changes everything. The other half is having the offer, the pages and the emails already built, so you can go and talk to those people this week instead of next quarter. The days off go on the calendar before the work does.

Build My Lifestyle Business

The Niche Everybody Picks Is The One That Argues Back

Say I have an accounting software with genuinely good features. Who do I go and find? Accountants. Obviously. They live in that software eight hours a day, they understand the benefits, they will get the technology immediately.

So I show up and say look, you are on something outdated, with this you press one button instead of twenty five, and it was built for accountants exactly like you. That works. It works far better than selling to everybody, and people have built empires at this level. I am not going to pretend otherwise.

But look at what you are actually doing. You are selling an improvement to something they already have. Which means they have to migrate, change their habits, retrain themselves and give up a system they already know. People stay with what they have even when what you are showing them is clearly better, because better is not the same as urgent.

Then there is the second problem. They already found alternatives. Some of them built their own internal system, because accountants happen to be very good at systemising things.

The third problem is the worst one. They have expertise. So you get yes but in my case that will not work because of this. Yes but the way you calculate the tax is not how I do it. Yes but I could probably build that myself. Every one of those is an objection you now have to sit there and answer.

The person who knows the most about what you sell is the person best equipped to argue with you about it.

Two Conditions, And Almost Nobody Checks The Second One

The best client meets two conditions, not one.

The first one everybody checks. They desperately need what you sell. Accountants need accounting software, that is the job, condition met.

The second one almost nobody checks. They have no idea how to make it happen. No clue whatsoever. That is the condition that quietly removes every objection from the conversation before it starts.

So keep the same software and go and find morticians. Do you think a mortician knows anything about accounting? They have other things to do. What they know is that last time they got hit with penalties on their taxes it was a nightmare, they are not an accountant, and they have no idea what to do about it.

The mortician is not going to tell you the form you use to calculate the tax is not the best one. The mortician is going to say oh my God, please, install it for me.

Same story with an AI automation for a chatbot. Sell it to a developer and you get yes but I could code that myself, and did you think about this edge case. Sell it to a plumber and you get when can you start.

I am on the receiving end of this myself. I am terrible with my hands. If something breaks in the house I have no idea how to fix it, and sometimes I desperately need it fixed. Someone turns up and says I will handle it, and I say yes please, go. If I were a handyman I would be standing there asking why he is coming at it from the left instead of the right, telling him I do not like his approach, thinking maybe I will just do it myself. Same job. Same person selling it. The only thing that changed is what I know.

Go And Look At Your Targeting Today

Open up whatever you use to track who you sell to and actually look at it.

If you are still at the top level talking to everyone, narrow it down. That part is easy and you already knew it.

If you have already niched down, ask the harder question. Are you talking to the people who could do this themselves? Not because that market is bad. Those people buy too. They buy speed and they buy convenience, so if you build something fast and simple they will pay for it even when they are experts. But they will make you work for every single sale.

Then write a second list next to it. Who out there needs the outcome you sell, badly, and has no route to it at all? Those are the ones who will not object. Those are the ones where you set the whole thing up for them, make it so simple that pressing one or two buttons is the entire job, and they go back to their real work and never think about it again.

You are not upgrading anything for those people. You are creating something that was not there.

Do not just read this and nod. Success likes speed and it likes execution. Look at who you sell to today, write the alternative list beside it, and go and talk to three of them this week.

Watch what happens to your conversion rate when nobody in the conversation is trying to prove they could have done it without you.

The Machine That Builds The Business Around Your Life

Not another course to watch. Seven days from now it is either running or it is not.

Everyone else is building a business they will need a holiday from. This one goes the other way round: the days off go on the calendar first, and the work is built around what is left. Most people spend six months on videos and webinars and still have nothing to sell. In seven days you have a lifestyle business already running.

Strategy always outwits tools. The tool is never the plan, the plan decides which tool you even need. So the offer gets picked, not brainstormed, and the pages are live and the emails are written before the week is out.

What's inside:

• Your offer, found and built around who you actually are: picked, not brainstormed

• Ninety percent of the work done for you: the pages, the funnel, the launch plan

• Emails, social copy and sales pages written for you: in your voice, ready to send

• Client deliverables in one click: branded per client

• A coach who knows your offer: awake whenever you are

• Cancel anytime, from inside the account: no year to sign, nothing to watch first

What it actually buys is the middle of a Tuesday. Peace of mind is the most precious thing you get, not money. You choose your clients and you refuse the annoying ones.

Pick The Right Client. Build Around Your Life.

Build My Lifestyle Business

Question: Who out there needs what you sell but has no idea how to get it, and have you ever tried selling to them?

Leave a comment

— Martin

Build a life you don’t need to escape from.

P.S. Funny thing about the free book. The chapter I almost deleted, the one on why wealthy people ignore most advice about saving, is the one readers email me about most. I thought it was too blunt. Turns out blunt is exactly what people needed, because polite money advice is what kept them broke in the first place. My free book. The 7 things the wealthiest 1% do that nobody taught you. Download it, read it tonight. If your money situation feels like effort without traction, start there. It costs you nothing but one evening.

The book is here if you want the blunt version

The exact system I use to automate my business →

How I get free traffic and buyers on autopilot →

My journey: how I built a business that runs without me →

Saturday. I spent most of the day building case studies, then I got sick of looking at my own screen and went to play ball for two hours.

Some of the guys said what they always say. You are a good shooter, why would you even want to play with us.

Here is the part they do not know. For most of my life I was a horrible shooter. Horrible is me being kind about it.

The Question A Reader Sent Me

A while back I talked about the masks we all wear. You do not speak to your teacher the way you speak to your best friend at two in the morning. You do not speak to your mother in law the way you speak to your wife. That is not being fake. We organised ourselves into societies, we had to learn to adapt to each other, so we built the ability to shift depending on who is standing in front of us.

Then someone wrote in with a fair question. Fine, we all wear masks. So which one is actually me?

I do not know you personally, so I cannot answer that for you. What I can hand you is the one test I run on myself.

Who are you when nobody is watching.

That is the whole test. Not who you are in the meeting. Not who you are in the comments. Who you are on a quiet afternoon, in an empty room, with nobody to perform for. Whoever that person is, that is your essence.

The Quiet Work Deserves A Better Machine

The hours nobody sees are the ones that build something real. The problem is that most people spend theirs on work a system should be handling instead, and there is nothing to show for it at the end of the year. The Lifestyle Business Machine flips the order. The days off go on the calendar before the work does.

Build My Lifestyle Business

Watch What Happens The Second Someone Notices

Before I was reserved, I was shy. Painfully shy. Shyness has one gift buried inside it. You get very good at observing and listening, because you are permanently waiting for the right moment to jump in.

So I watched people. A lot of people. Looking back I probably came across as slightly creepy, and I will own that.

Try it once, without staring anyone down. Sit on a bench somewhere and watch someone who believes nobody can see them. Then watch the exact second they work out that they are being looked at. The back straightens. The chest lifts. The head comes up. The whole posture reorganises itself in under a second.

Nothing about the person changed. Only the audience did.

Everybody has a version that runs in an empty room, and a version that boots up when someone walks in. The empty room version is the real one.

The Shooter Nobody Watched

Back to the court. I am a good shooter now. I was not born one.

The reason is not talent. The reason is a pile of hours nobody saw. I used to go and play at night, on my own, for hours, while everyone else was asleep, working on my shot. No crowd. No teammates. Nobody standing there handing me credit for it. Just me, a ball and a rim.

Those guys on the court never saw a minute of that. They see the result and they assume the result is the person.

My business was built exactly the same way. The hours that made it happened at home, by myself, with nobody pushing me and nobody watching. That Saturday started with me writing up case studies for work I had been running quietly in the background on Facebook, Google and Instagram, the kind of results friends had to talk me into showing publicly at all.

Nobody applauds while you are doing that part. That is exactly why it is the part that counts.

What It Costs To Wear The Wrong Face

You have met the opposite type. The person at the office who stays late with nothing left to do, purely so that people see them staying. Never the first one to leave. The last thing on earth they would do is sit somewhere alone.

I had my own version of it. When I was younger I ran a Mr Nice Guy setting, because if you do enough nice things then maybe people will take an interest in you. It worked well enough that it stayed for years. Being honest, I am grumpier on my own than I am around other people, and a good part of that gap was the effort of holding an image up.

I do not run it anymore. Not because I turned into a better person, but because once you actually know who you are and what you want, other people's opinions stop being load bearing.

There is a real bill for the other way. You do things you never wanted to do so you can accommodate somebody, then you quietly resent them for it, and they have no idea why, and now there is drama that nobody asked for. I did plenty of that. Then I stopped, and my life got noticeably better.

Do This One This Week

Catch yourself when there is nobody around. What are you actually doing. What are you thinking about. What do you reach for when there is no audience and no reason to put on a show.

Whatever that is, that is you. Build from there, because being yourself costs no effort at all. Being someone else is a full time job with terrible pay.

You are going to spend your entire life with this person. You may as well find out who they are.

The Machine That Builds The Business Around Your Life

Not another course to watch. Seven days from now it is either running or it is not.

Everyone else is building a business they will need a holiday from. This one goes the other way round: the days off go on the calendar first, and the work is built around what is left. Most people spend six months on videos and webinars and still have nothing to sell. In seven days you have a lifestyle business already running.

Strategy always outwits tools. The tool is never the plan, the plan decides which tool you even need. So the offer gets picked, not brainstormed, and the pages are live and the emails are written before the week is out.

What's inside:

• Your offer, found and built around who you actually are: picked, not brainstormed

• Ninety percent of the work done for you: the pages, the funnel, the launch plan

• Emails, social copy and sales pages written for you: in your voice, ready to send

• Client deliverables in one click: branded per client

• A coach who knows your offer: awake whenever you are

• Cancel anytime, from inside the account: no year to sign, nothing to watch first

What it actually buys is the middle of a Tuesday. Peace of mind is the most precious thing you get, not money. You choose your clients and you refuse the annoying ones.

Built In Private. Running In Public.

Build My Lifestyle Business

Question: Who are you when nobody is watching, and is that person building anything?

Leave a comment

— Martin

Build a life you don’t need to escape from.

P.S. Funny thing about that automation I walked you through today: I did not build the first version for myself. I built it for a client who was answering emails at 11pm while his kids slept. Real client systems, real numbers. Mine runs my whole back office. If you would rather I build yours than read about mine, the door is here.

See if a done-for-you build fits your business

The exact system I use to automate my business →

How I get free traffic and buyers on autopilot →

My journey: how I built a business that runs without me →

It was day eighteen when I finally opened the spreadsheet. Two posts. That was all I had made. I put them out, got busy with other things, and forgot they existed. The number sitting there was $2,171.92. Money that had landed while I was doing nothing at all.

The Number That Made Me Build A Spreadsheet

I wanted to answer a question I had been curious about for years. How much money can one post actually make you? Not on the day you publish it. Over its whole life. So I ran a clean test. I made a single post on two networks, then I stopped posting anything else. Whatever came in after that could only come from those two pieces of content.

One platform brought in $1,348.77. The other brought in $823. That is $2,171.92 in eighteen days from work I had already forgotten I did. My best single day was around $500. On an average day it was pulling $120, and it kept climbing as the content started ranking. So I built a little Google sheet to track it, because I know myself. I forget these things exist, and then I miss the whole point of what they prove.

The point is not the money. The point is that I stopped, and it did not.

The Machine Behind Every Post That Keeps Paying

Everything you just read comes from running a business built to fit around the life, not the other way round. The Lifestyle Business Machine sets up the systems that keep working after you stop, so the days off go on the calendar before the work does.

Build My Lifestyle Business

I Did The Work Once. The Bot Did The Rest.

Here is the part most people skip. I was not sitting there posting every day. I did not even make those posts myself. I built a bot to do it.

The bot studies what already works on the platform first. It looks at the visuals that got traction, then creates one in the same spirit. It reads the captions and descriptions that pulled clicks, then writes its own version. Then it posts, on my account, several times a day, without me touching anything.

That is the quiet advantage. I get to benefit from all the research and all the hard work other people already did. The bot takes the best of what is proven, remixes it, and ships it while I sleep. I am not guessing at what might work. I am standing on top of everything that already worked.

Build the machine that makes the content. Do not become the machine yourself.

Why Pinterest Quietly Prints Money

Most people have no idea how powerful Pinterest is. These were organic clicks. Free traffic. I did not pay for a single one. One of those pieces of content generated more than 9,000 outbound clicks in a couple of months, real people tapping through to exactly where I wanted them to go.

That is the difference between a pin and a normal social post. A post on most networks dies within a day. A pin keeps ranking. More people see it this week than last week, and more will see it next month. The content compounds instead of evaporating. That is why the daily average kept climbing instead of dropping, weeks after I had walked away from it.

Traffic you rent disappears the moment you stop paying. Traffic you earn keeps showing up long after you left the room.

Stop Judging A Post By The Day You Publish It

Most people measure a post by how it did on the day it went out. A few likes, a couple of comments, then straight on to the next one. That is the treadmill, and it never ends. You are always one day away from having to feed it again.

Flip the question. Ask instead what that post will still be doing in six months. If the answer is nothing, you made a moment. If the answer is that it is still bringing clicks and sales, you built an asset. Two forgotten posts became an asset because a system kept them alive and a platform kept ranking them.

This is why I would rather build a business that pays me while I am at the beach than one that needs me on a call to earn a single dollar. No selling on the phone, no chasing orders, no support headaches, no starting from zero every Monday. You do the work once, and it keeps working.

I am going to keep tracking this one. I want to see what two posts are worth after a full year. My guess is the number is going to look ridiculous. But even at day eighteen, the lesson has already paid for itself.

If you want the exact system I use to make my business run without me, start here.

The Machine That Builds The Business Around Your Life

Not another course to watch. Seven days from now it is either running or it is not.

Everyone else is building a business they will need a holiday from. This one goes the other way round: the days off go on the calendar first, and the work is built around what is left. Most people spend six months on videos and webinars and still have nothing to sell. In seven days you have a lifestyle business already running.

Strategy always outwits tools. The tool is never the plan, the plan decides which tool you even need. So the offer gets picked, not brainstormed, and the pages are live and the emails are written before the week is out.

What's inside:

• Your offer, found and built around who you actually are: picked, not brainstormed

• Ninety percent of the work done for you: the pages, the funnel, the launch plan

• Emails, social copy and sales pages written for you: in your voice, ready to send

• Client deliverables in one click: branded per client

• A coach who knows your offer: awake whenever you are

• Cancel anytime, from inside the account: no year to sign, nothing to watch first

What it actually buys is the middle of a Tuesday. Peace of mind is the most precious thing you get, not money. You choose your clients and you refuse the annoying ones.

A Business You Do Not Need A Holiday From

Build My Lifestyle Business

Question: What is one post or task you could build once and let run for a whole year?

Leave a comment

— Martin

Build a life you don’t need to escape from.

P.S. A lesson that cost me years: I used to measure my outreach by volume. More emails, more follow-ups, more hours. Then I tracked where my actual clients came from and almost all of them were already in buying mode before I ever wrote a word. The volume was theater. That realization is why Direct Email Leads exists. In the last hour alone the feed refreshed 88 leads, every one tied to a real buying signal and a verified decision maker email. If you are still emailing cold databases, the difference is worth five minutes of your time.

See the live feed for your niche

The exact system I use to automate my business →

How I get free traffic and buyers on autopilot →

My journey: how I built a business that runs without me →

It was six in the evening in Sydney and I was recording a podcast from my car. Half an hour earlier, the woman I loved had told me I gave her zero support. Not a little. Zero. And I had spent weeks doing everything I could think of to help her.

She said I gave her nothing

My girlfriend was building a brand. Bracelets, jewelry, the whole thing. It was new to her, and I have spent years inside online marketing, so I did what felt obvious. I gave her the map. The steps. What to do first, what would come next, the walls she would hit and what was waiting on the other side of them.

Then we sat down to talk, and she told me she was not getting any support from me. I said, what do you mean, I am doing everything I can. Two days before that we had a fight so big we did not speak for an entire day. Over this. Over me, in my own head, being the most supportive man alive.

Here is the uncomfortable part. She was right. I was giving her everything I had. It just was not the thing she needed.

The Business I Built To Fit My Life

Everything I write here comes out of running a business that fits around my life instead of swallowing it. That is the whole point of The Lifestyle Business Machine: you pick the offer, the work gets built for you, and seven days from now it is either running or it is not. The days off go on the calendar before the work does.

Build My Lifestyle Business

There are two kinds of support and I only spoke one

What I was handing her was operational support. Tactical support. Picture a general with a megaphone telling the soldiers to go left, go right, dig in here. Useful, a bit cold, all instructions. When you face something you have never done, there is a wall in front of you and you cannot see behind it. A good mentor can see behind that wall, and either hands you the answers or asks the questions that make you find them. That is what I was giving her, my view over the wall.

But there is a second kind of support, and it is the one she actually wanted. Emotional support. You can do this. You are on the right track. I believe in you.

I am terrible at that, and I know exactly why. My validation comes from inside. I have never needed anyone to tell me to keep going, so it never crosses my mind that someone else might. I was giving her the support I would want if I were in her shoes. She is not me. When you hand someone the support you would want, you are really talking to yourself.

The tennis racquet that started a war

It got worse before it got better. She wanted to go ask a real expert in branding for advice. I told her to wait, because that expert was going to ask her a stack of questions she did not have answers to yet, and we should prepare those first.

In my head this was me protecting her. Imagine asking Roger Federer for a tennis lesson and turning up with no racquet and no kit. He sends you home to come back ready. I was trying to get her ready.

She did not hear protection. She heard you do not believe in me, you think I will waste this person's time, you are contradicting me. Same words, completely different message. That is how the day of silence began. Two people can push in the exact same direction and still end up in a fight nobody needed.

The six that was a nine

There is an old picture of a single number painted on the floor. One person stands on one side and reads a six. Another stands on the other side and reads a nine. Both are looking at the same thing. Both are right. Being right does not make the other person wrong.

That was us. I was giving her a six with total conviction. She was standing where a nine was the only honest answer. So here is what I actually walked away with, and what I want you to keep.

If you are the one who needs support, look hard at the person in front of you before you decide they have abandoned you. They may be pouring everything they have into helping you, in a language you were never taught to read. There are people in your corner you cannot see, only because the message keeps arriving in the wrong accent.

And if you are the one giving support, do the same work in reverse. Find out what the person actually needs, emotional or operational, before you give them what you would want. I had done this once before, when I mentored someone who ran on constant encouragement, and I planned for it. With the person closest to me, I forgot completely. The goal was never to be right. It was to be understood.

This matters more the further you go. The moment you get serious about building something, your mindset shifts, and the people around you feel it. Relationships change on their own. Pile misunderstandings on top of that and it gets heavy fast. Reading the language early is how you keep the people who matter close while you build.

Know a coach or consultant who would get real use out of the system I run my own business on? Refer them and you both win. You make money, they get the machine. Want it for yourself? Same link, just pick the buyer option.

Refer a friend and earn, or grab it yourself →

The Machine That Builds The Business Around Your Life

Not another course to watch. Seven days from now it is either running or it is not.

Everyone else is building a business they will need a holiday from. This one goes the other way round: the days off go on the calendar first, and the work is built around what is left. Most people spend six months on videos and webinars and still have nothing to sell. In seven days you have a lifestyle business already running.

Strategy always outwits tools. The tool is never the plan, the plan decides which tool you even need. So the offer gets picked, not brainstormed, and the pages are live and the emails are written before the week is out.

What's inside:

• Your offer, found and built around who you actually are: picked, not brainstormed

• Ninety percent of the work done for you: the pages, the funnel, the launch plan

• Emails, social copy and sales pages written for you: in your voice, ready to send

• Client deliverables in one click: branded per client

• A coach who knows your offer: awake whenever you are

• Cancel anytime, from inside the account: no year to sign, nothing to watch first

What it actually buys is the middle of a Tuesday. Peace of mind is the most precious thing you get, not money. You choose your clients and you refuse the annoying ones.

A Business You Do Not Need To Escape From

Build My Lifestyle Business

Question: When did someone support you in a language you almost missed, and how did you finally hear it?

Leave a comment

— Martin

Build a life you don't need to escape from.

P.S. Someone in Automation Nation asked me yesterday why I still automate things that only save me ten minutes. Because ten minutes a day is a full work week a year, and you never get weeks back. The room is here if you are curious

https://martinebongue.com/automation-nation?utm_source=house&utm_medium=substack&utm_campaign=automation-nation&utm_content=ps

The exact system I use to automate my business →

How I get free traffic and buyers on autopilot →

My journey: how I built a business that runs without me →

It is a Monday morning. I open one bookmarked page, copy the name of a city, paste it into a tool I built for myself, and press a single button. A few seconds later I am looking at seventy personal trainers in Los Angeles, and every one of them has quietly asked to be contacted.

That is most of my working day. I did not cold call anyone. I did not learn a thing about fitness. I do not even know how to run a gym. And by the time my coffee had gone cold, the machine had already started doing the part everyone thinks is the hard part.

The morning that takes ten minutes

Here is my actual routine, start to finish. I keep a plain list of the biggest cities in a country bookmarked. Monday I pick New York. Tuesday, Los Angeles. Wednesday, Chicago. I drop the city into the tool, choose a profession, pick the common email domains people use, and hit search. It hands me a clean report of real people with their city, their state, their country, and their line of work already filled in. I export it, drop it into my email tool, and close the laptop.

Run that across a few networks and you are looking at around five hundred people in about a minute. Instagram gives me some, Twitter gives me some, Facebook and the rest fill the gap. None of it is clever. The clever part happened once, the day I built the thing. After that it is copy a city, press a button, go and live your life.

The work was never the selling. The work was building the machine one time.

The Business I Built Around My Mornings

Everything you just read comes out of running a business that fits around the life first, not the other way round. That is exactly what The Lifestyle Business Machine builds with you: the offer, the pages, the emails, done in seven days. The days off go on the calendar before the work does.

Build My Lifestyle Business

One template that fits everyone

The piece that makes this work is almost stupid in how simple it is. I have one email. Not one per profession, not one per city. One email, for all of it.

It is stitched together with placeholders. The channel I found you on. Your city. Your state. Your country. Your profession. When the email goes out, each of those gets swapped for your real details. So a personal trainer in Los Angeles reads a note that names Los Angeles, California and personal training, and a dentist in Paris reads the exact same template naming Paris, France and dentistry. Both of them feel like I sat down and wrote to them by hand.

Here is what I actually did. I wrote that one email once, dropped the coloured tags where the details go, and let the tool fill in the rest for every single person on the list, forever.

Personal at scale is not a contradiction. It is a placeholder.

Find the wound, not the customer

Now the part that actually matters, because a list of names is worthless if you have nothing those people need. Let me show you the exact case study I ran with those personal trainers.

When covid hit, the professions built on proximity got wiped out. A personal trainer makes money by standing next to a client, and suddenly nobody could stand next to anybody. Income gone. But the trainers who moved online did not just survive, they grew, because everyone was stuck at home and had finally found the time to train. So the message writes itself. You got hurt once when you could not reach your clients. Let me help you build the online half of your business so the next lockdown cannot touch you.

And here is the honest part. I have no idea how to take a gym online. I do not need to. I find a vendor who already does it, agree on a fifty percent cut, and point the leads at their page. These are courses that can sell for around a thousand dollars, so one sale can put five hundred in my pocket, and I never build a product or answer a single support ticket.

You are not the expert in the room. You are the bridge to the one who is.

Why I call this automated, not passive

People love the phrase passive income. I do not use it, because nothing is truly passive. I say automated income instead, and the difference is the whole point. Someone had to build the automation. In this case that someone was me, on one quiet afternoon, wiring a lead tool to an email sequence to an affiliate link.

Everyone else is fighting over traffic and audiences and going hoarse trying to be seen. Meanwhile there are billions of people sitting on those same networks, and almost none of them understand how any of it connects. That gap is the whole opportunity. One system that finds the people already in pain, one template that speaks to each of them by name, one link that pays you when they buy. This is one of more than forty income streams I run, and the proof is public, on my own channel, screen recorded, numbers and all.

Build the machine once. Then let your mornings go quiet.

Know a coach or a consultant who is still selling by hand, one exhausting conversation at a time? Send them this. You make money when they come on board, and they finally get a system instead of a hamster wheel. Want it for yourself instead? Same link, just pick the buyer option.

Refer someone and get paid →

The Machine That Builds The Business Around Your Life

Not another course to watch. Seven days from now it is either running or it is not.

Everyone else is building a business they will need a holiday from. This one goes the other way round: the days off go on the calendar first, and the work is built around what is left. Most people spend six months on videos and webinars and still have nothing to sell. In seven days you have a lifestyle business already running.

Strategy always outwits tools. The tool is never the plan, the plan decides which tool you even need. So the offer gets picked, not brainstormed, and the pages are live and the emails are written before the week is out.

What's inside:

• Your offer, found and built around who you actually are: picked, not brainstormed

• Ninety percent of the work done for you: the pages, the funnel, the launch plan

• Emails, social copy and sales pages written for you: in your voice, ready to send

• Client deliverables in one click: branded per client

• A coach who knows your offer: awake whenever you are

• Cancel anytime, from inside the account: no year to sign, nothing to watch first

What it actually buys is the middle of a Tuesday. Peace of mind is the most precious thing you get, not money. You choose your clients and you refuse the annoying ones.

A Business You Do Not Escape From

Build My Lifestyle Business

Question: What could you sell without ever building the product yourself?

Leave a comment

— Martin

Build a life you don’t need to escape from.

P.S. I built it, tested it, and packaged it so you can paste it into Claude and have it running before your coffee goes cold. One of these lands every day, and the door is still $9. If you want to see the last few days of drops, they are all listed here.

Peek at the latest drops →

The exact system I use to automate my business →

How I get free traffic and buyers on autopilot →

My journey: how I built a business that runs without me →

Yesterday I sat in a Rotary Club meeting and watched the man next to me go pale. We were there to talk about a project to help a group of kids, something that actually mattered, and in about ninety seconds he had to stand up and say it out loud to a room full of strangers. He knew the material cold. That did not help him at all. His hands were already going.

So right before he stood, I leaned over and changed one small thing about how he was going to open. That one change is the reason the room got on board, and it is the same thing I want to hand you today.

The mistake almost everyone makes

Most of us build a presentation the way we would write a research paper. We stuff it with facts. Fifty two percent of this, a study found that, the data clearly shows. I am a factual guy by nature, so I understand the pull. Facts feel safe. They feel like proof that you did your homework.

Here is what actually happens when you open with them. Nothing. The room does not lean in. Nobody sits up. And it gets worse, because now you are standing there trying to remember a pile of numbers while your heart is doing its best to climb out of your chest. You glance at your notes, which makes you more nervous, so you glance again. It is a bad loop, and it starts the second you decide facts are the safe opening.

Facts are the heaviest thing you can carry onto a stage.

The Business Behind Every Story I Tell You

Everything I write here comes out of running a business that fits around my life instead of swallowing it. That is what The Lifestyle Business Machine builds with you, the offer, the pages, the emails, done inside a week. The days off go on the calendar before the work does.

Build My Lifestyle Business

What people are actually built to hear

There is one thing every human being is wired to pay attention to, and it is not a statistic. It is a story. Say the words “let me tell you a story” out loud and watch what happens in the room. People go quiet. Their attention points straight at you, like a dog that just heard the fridge door open.

We have passed everything down this way for thousands of years. Every lesson your parents gave you came wrapped in a story. So ask yourself an honest question. Can you remember a single fact you heard five years ago? Probably not one. But you can still repeat the frightening story a friend told you about the bear in the woods. Nobody remembers that there was fourteen percent fat in the milk. Everybody remembers the bear.

People forget your facts by lunch. They repeat your story for years.

Why a story also rescues you

Here is the part nobody mentions. Opening with a story does not only help the audience. It saves the speaker, which on a nervous day is you.

When you tell a story, and especially your own story, there is nothing to memorize. You are not reciting numbers you will blank on the moment your hands start shaking. You are just telling people what happened. Think about the stories you have already told a hundred times, the one about the bakery, the one about the trip that went sideways. You never needed notes for those. You could tell them half asleep. That is exactly the feeling you want in the first minute of a talk, and a story is how you get it.

You can forget a statistic. You cannot forget something you lived.

You only need it for the first sixty seconds

The nerves live at the beginning. That is the whole truth of it. Once you are moving, once you are past that first wall, you settle and you are fine. So you do not have to turn the entire presentation into a story. You just need the opening to be one. Get through the first sixty seconds on something you cannot possibly blank on, and the rest carries itself.

That is exactly what I did for the man beside me at the Rotary Club. I did not hand him a slide full of numbers. I stood up and told the room they were about to hear his story, and then I let him simply tell it. It was honest, a little emotional, and it landed. People got on board. We walked out with real contacts, people who genuinely wanted to help the project.

Start with a story and the hardest part is already behind you.

None of this is about becoming a smoother performer. It is about respecting how people are built. They did not come to file your data. They came to feel something. Give them the story first and they hand you their attention. Then, if you still want your fourteen percent and your fifty two percent, they are actually listening when you get there.

The next time something you care about depends on you standing up and speaking, do not open with a fact. Open with a story. Preferably your own.

The Machine That Builds The Business Around Your Life

Not another course to watch. Seven days from now it is either running or it is not.

Everyone else is building a business they will need a holiday from. This one goes the other way round: the days off go on the calendar first, and the work is built around what is left. Most people spend six months on videos and webinars and still have nothing to sell. In seven days you have a lifestyle business already running.

Strategy always outwits tools. The tool is never the plan, the plan decides which tool you even need. So the offer gets picked, not brainstormed, and the pages are live and the emails are written before the week is out.

What's inside:

• Your offer, found and built around who you actually are: picked, not brainstormed

• Ninety percent of the work done for you: the pages, the funnel, the launch plan

• Emails, social copy and sales pages written for you: in your voice, ready to send

• Client deliverables in one click: branded per client

• A coach who knows your offer: awake whenever you are

• Cancel anytime, from inside the account: no year to sign, nothing to watch first

What it actually buys is the middle of a Tuesday. Peace of mind is the most precious thing you get, not money. You choose your clients and you refuse the annoying ones.

A Business You Do Not Escape From

Build My Lifestyle Business

Question: What is the one story you would open your next talk with?

Leave a comment

— Martin

Build a life you don’t need to escape from.

P.S. My first automation was embarrassing. It saved maybe ten minutes a day and I was absurdly proud of it. But that ten minutes taught me the loop: spot the repeat task, map it, wire it, forget it. Martin runs 166 real automations in his own business. The first one is the only hard one. Automations Made Easy exists to get you through it in a week, no code. The build notes and the case studies are here if you are curious.

See the case study library, start with the one closest to your own Tuesday task

The exact system I use to automate my business →

How I get free traffic and buyers on autopilot →

My journey: how I built a business that runs without me →

Last night I checked my numbers and close to 40,000 people had seen my content in the previous 24 hours. Thirty-nine thousand seven hundred, to be exact. Most people would look at that and think about the clicks, or the sales that follow. I was thinking about an email I was about to send to a company that had never heard of my name.

The number that stopped me was 39,700

That traffic comes from one account I have been running for a while now. Over the last 30 days it pulled 1.46 million impressions, and last night the 24-hour count sat close to 40,000. I watched it move in real time, ticking up while I sat there. That is close to 40,000 people who saw something of mine in a single day, and it is huge for branding alone.

Here is the part that matters. I do not touch it. There is no content I sit down to make, no daily posting, nothing I have to remember. It runs in the background on automation because I built it that way on purpose. When I set it up, I was not planning to hand it to anyone. I built it for me, which is exactly why I made it as hands-off as humanly possible. It had to run without eating my time.

Most people see a number like that and stop at the obvious wins. The clicks were never the interesting part.

The Skills That Open Doors Before The Money Does

Every edge I just described started as a system I tested on myself first. Skills Black Magic is where I hand you those systems one at a time, plus a brand new money playbook I personally add every single week that compresses a full course into a few minutes of action. As a Substack subscriber, your membership already covers the community. No extra cost.

Join Skills Black Magic Today

The clicks were never the real prize

The real prize is access. When you have a sizable audience, you can walk up to companies that would normally ignore you and get a yes. I go to brands and AI labs that have a waiting list, the ones everyone is queuing behind, and I send a simple message: I have a sizable audience, let me test your tool and I will review it. That one line moves me to the front. The door that stays shut for most people opens for me.

That is the benefit nobody talks about. It is not the money sitting in the account. It is the fact that having something real and running gives you leverage you can spend somewhere else entirely. An audience is not a vanity number. It is a key.

Two and a half million free tokens a day

Here is what that access looked like in practice. One AI lab handed me API access to a large language model I now rate far above ChatGPT, and they gave it to me months before it opened to the public. I did not even know the full deal at first. It was only a few weeks before the account really got moving that I found out the access came with two and a half million tokens a day. Free.

Same story with image tools. I had access to DALL-E while most people were still reading about it. Same with the video creation tools. Right now there is a video tool called Sora that everyone wants in on, and I am about to send the same message I always send. I already know how it goes. They give it to me because I can put it in front of a lot of people, and that reach is worth something to them.

So I get to build with the best tools roughly six months before the rest of the market can touch them. Call it what it is. That is an unfair advantage, and it did not come from money. It came from having an audience that runs on its own.

Build the asset once, then let it open doors

This is the shift I want you to sit with. You do not build an audience only to sell to it. You build it because it becomes the thing that gets you into rooms you were not invited to. Free tools before your competitors. VIP treatment from companies that would not answer your email otherwise. A head start that compounds every single time a new tool drops.

And the best version of this asset is the one you are not chained to. Mine took real work to set up, and then it stopped needing me. That is the whole point. If it needs you every day, it is a job you built for yourself. If it runs without you, it is an asset that keeps paying in ways you did not plan for.

So the question is not how do I make my audience bigger this week. The question is what would open up for me if I had one that ran on its own. Build that first. The doors come after.

The Daily AI Skills Running My Business While I Write to You

How to add them to yours in five minutes a day.

For 15 years I have been building businesses, running teams, and closing deals. Skills Black Magic is where I document every AI skill that has saved me hours, landed contracts, or uncovered leverage I did not know I had. Over 2,000 entrepreneurs read it every day.

And there is something brand new. Every single week I personally add a fresh money-making playbook to your membership. Each one takes a full course, the kind that would cost you weeks to work through, and compresses it into a few minutes of action you can run today and start getting results from. These are the exact blueprints I use to run a seven-figure business, written down step by step and included in your membership at no extra cost.

What's inside:

• Daily hand-picked AI skills: researched, tested in a real business generating seven figures, zero noise

• A brand-new money playbook every week: I personally add a fresh action-packed playbook that compresses a full course into minutes of action, included in your membership at no extra cost

• Five-minute installs: built for non-technical founders, no code needed, no PhD required

• Filtered by what you actually do: choose your business type and only see what is relevant to your goals

• Substack subscribers get VIP access: your subscription already covers the community fee, no extra cost

• Annual subscribers get the workshop too: the same training others paid $1,000 for, included at no extra charge

Here’s what our members are saying:

“I have been running my business for 14 years and I thought I knew everything about productivity. Martin showed me three AI tools last month that cut my proposal time in half. I closed two extra deals because of the time I got back.” — David R., Agency founder

“Martin does not send you another video to watch or a PDF to file away. Every skill lands in my inbox ready to use before my second coffee. I added six new workflows in my first month.” — Sandra T., E-commerce consultant

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Over 2,000 entrepreneurs have added Skills Black Magic to their daily routine. They are not waiting for AI to get easier. They are already using it while everyone else is still watching explainer videos.

The Head Start Most Founders Never Get

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Question: What door would open for you if you had an audience that ran on its own?

Leave a comment

— Martin

Build a life you don’t need to escape from.

P.S. Quick lesson from my own cold email numbers. The variable that moved replies the most was not the subject line or the offer. It was how recently the prospect started their business. A brand new owner reads everything because nobody is pitching them yet. That is the whole reason I run 50kemailsaday.com. This week it captured 23,003 fresh registrations carrying both a verified email and a phone number. If you want to see what a day-one lead actually looks like, the sample is here.

Peek at a sample of this week's day-one leads

The exact system I use to automate my business →

How I get free traffic and buyers on autopilot →

My journey: how I built a business that runs without me →

A few years ago I logged into the tool that held my entire email list. Overnight, the company behind it had decided to pivot. Same login, a completely different product, and the one feature my whole business ran on was simply gone.

They did not ask me. They did not refund me. They changed everything and left me scrambling. That was the day I stopped renting the most important part of my business.

Here is the system I run instead. It has two jobs, and keeping them separate is the whole trick.

Your Business Should Not Live On Rented Land

Most of us build our email list on someone else's platform and never think about it. Then reality shows up in three ways. The first is cost. An autoresponder charges you based on the size of your database. It starts at ten dollars, feels harmless, then your list grows and you are at a hundred, then five hundred, then a thousand dollars every month. You never truly control that number. It keeps climbing as you succeed, which is a strange thing to be punished for.

The second is freedom. A lot of these tools decide what you are allowed to import and what you are allowed to send. I have watched platforms ban affiliate emails outright. Someone on their side reviews your campaigns and can simply say no. The third is longevity. They can suspend you on a whim, or pivot the whole company the way mine did. I do not want anyone outside my business to be able to switch it off.

When you own the pipes, the price stays flat at any list size, and nobody gets a vote on whether your business keeps running.

The Skills Running These Campaigns While I Sleep

Every automation in this email, the tagging, the segmenting, the sequence that never sleeps, started as one small skill I tested in my own business. Skills Black Magic is where I keep them, one five minute install at a time, plus a brand new money playbook I add every single week that compresses a full course into minutes of action. As a Substack subscriber, your membership already covers the community. No extra cost.

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The Golden Question Almost Nobody Asks

Here is the mistake I see everywhere. People assume that if someone is interested in a subject, they must want to hear about that subject from them. Those are two completely different things. It is not because someone loves basketball that they want to hear about basketball from you. They might want it from a friend, a coach, a favourite channel, and that is perfectly fine.

So the golden question is not are they interested in this topic. The golden question is are they interested in hearing from me. I start with a large, highly targeted list of people who care about a subject. My first job is not to sell them anything. It is to find the smaller group, usually around forty percent, who actually want to hear from me.

Stop talking to everyone who fits the topic. Start finding the people who want you to be the one talking.

My Acquisition Campaign Never Sends More Than Four Emails

This is the part that looks complicated and really is not. A new person lands in a segment and a short campaign starts. I send email one. If they open it, I tag them as an opener, which already tells me they were curious enough to look. If they click, they have just answered the golden question. They want to hear from me.

The moment someone clicks, I move them out of this campaign, tag them as interested, and mark them do not contact. People get confused here. Why would you stop contacting the person who just raised their hand? Because they graduated. Do not contact them in the acquisition sequence anymore, they belong somewhere better now. Anyone who has not clicked gets email two after three days, email three after seven, email four after fourteen. Then I stop. Four emails is the ceiling so I never harass anyone.

If they never raise their hand after four honest attempts, that is my answer, and I have plenty of other people to talk to.

Nurturing Is Where The Money Actually Gets Made

The people who clicked are proven. Now they move into a nurturing sequence, and this one has no four email ceiling. These are not hard sales emails. They are case studies, stories about who I am and what I actually do, the slow work of earning trust from someone who already told me they want to listen.

I started one of these servers a couple of days ago and it is running on full automation while I write this. The open rates on that sequence sit around thirty and thirty five percent, and some emails climb close to fifty. No ad spend. No funnel software. No paid clicks. Just a clean list of people who chose to be there. I do not even write those emails one at a time. I press a button, they get drafted for me, and I load them into the sequence.

The acquisition campaign earns you the right to sell. The nurturing sequence is where that right turns into revenue.

That is the whole system on a napkin. Two jobs, kept separate. Most people blast every contact the same way and wonder why nothing converts. Find the people who want you first. Then earn their attention slowly. And own the infrastructure underneath all of it, so the day a platform decides to pivot, it is their problem and not yours.

If you want to see how I wire the automations that run this quietly in the background, everything I actually use is linked below.

The Daily AI Skills Running My Business While I Write to You

How to add them to yours in five minutes a day.

For 15 years I have been building businesses, running teams, and closing deals. Skills Black Magic is where I document every AI skill that has saved me hours, landed contracts, or uncovered leverage I did not know I had. Over 2,000 entrepreneurs read it every day.

And there is something brand new. Every single week I personally add a fresh money-making playbook to your membership. Each one takes a full course, the kind that would cost you weeks to work through, and compresses it into a few minutes of action you can run today and start getting results from. These are the exact blueprints I use to run a seven-figure business, written down step by step and included in your membership at no extra cost.

What's inside:

• Daily hand-picked AI skills: researched, tested in a real business generating seven figures, zero noise

• A brand-new money playbook every week: I personally add a fresh action-packed playbook that compresses a full course into minutes of action, included in your membership at no extra cost

• Five-minute installs: built for non-technical founders, no code needed, no PhD required

• Filtered by what you actually do: choose your business type and only see what is relevant to your goals

• Substack subscribers get VIP access: your subscription already covers the community fee, no extra cost

• Annual subscribers get the workshop too: the same training others paid $1,000 for, included at no extra charge

Here’s what our members are saying:

“I have been running my business for 14 years and I thought I knew everything about productivity. Martin showed me three AI tools last month that cut my proposal time in half. I closed two extra deals because of the time I got back.” — David R., Agency founder

“Martin does not send you another video to watch or a PDF to file away. Every skill lands in my inbox ready to use before my second coffee. I added six new workflows in my first month.” — Sandra T., E-commerce consultant

Join Skills Black Magic Today

Over 2,000 entrepreneurs have added Skills Black Magic to their daily routine. They are not waiting for AI to get easier. They are already using it while everyone else is still watching explainer videos.

Turning One Email List Into Real Revenue

Join Skills Black Magic Today

Question: What part of your email setup are you still renting from a platform that could change the rules on you tomorrow?

Leave a comment

— Martin

Build a life you don't need to escape from.

P.S. One afternoon of fixes later and you can verify that in Google PageSpeed yourself. The lesson was not the score. It was that none of the fixes required talent, just knowing which ones mattered. That list is what the $29 audit hands you.

If you want to see which fixes your site is missing

The exact system I use to automate my business →

How I get free traffic and buyers on autopilot →

My journey: how I built a business that runs without me →

I was flat on my back for five days with my leg propped up on a pillow, staring at the ceiling, with no clue whether anything inside my knee was torn. It took half a second to get there.

One scooter, one intersection I had already slowed down for and checked, and I was on crutches again, back to square one on a knee I had spent weeks rehabbing. This is episode 365, and I almost did not record it. I am glad I did, because the whole thing handed me a lesson I keep forgetting in my business too.

Half A Second On A Bali Road

I ride a scooter here in Canggu, in Bali. If you have spent any time in the Valley you know the traffic can be brutal, and when the cars are stuck bumper to bumper you weave through the gaps. There is a lane on the left of the cars and a lane on the right, and I was in the middle of the road between the two.

I got to an intersection. I actually slowed down and checked it, because I knew people come out of there. Then a guy I happen to know came reversing out between the stuck cars, trying to turn, and we ran into each other. The impact was small. I had already braked. But the scooter went down with my leg trapped underneath, and I yanked it out three times before I was free. That was enough to wreck the same knee I had been carefully doing physiotherapy on.

I went straight to the hospital because I did not want to take chances. No MRI available that day, so an X-ray first, which showed nothing broken. Then four days in bed with the leg elevated, no weight on it, no idea how bad it was, until the MRI finally came back clean. No torn ligament. Just an edema on the bone marrow that rest and a little physio will fix.

The whole crash lasted less time than it takes to read this sentence.

The Daily Details That Quietly Run My Business

Every result I get comes down to the small, unglamorous details I actually keep doing instead of dropping once things get comfortable. Skills Black Magic is where I hand you those details as ready-to-run AI skills, one at a time, plus a brand new money playbook I add every single week that compresses a whole course into minutes of action. As a Substack subscriber, your membership already covers the community. No extra cost.

Join Skills Black Magic Today

I Refused To Blame The Other Guy

The easy version of this story writes itself. That guy came out of nowhere. He was reversing where he should not have been. Not my fault. A lot of people here have an accident and the only thing they do afterwards is blame the other person.

But that is not the true version, and I know it. I know that road. I know that when the cars are jammed, someone always squeezes through the gap to get out. I know that at that intersection you come to a full stop, not a polite little roll. I slowed down. I did not stop. That part was on me, and pretending otherwise would just guarantee I do it again.

You see the same reflex in business every day. The algorithm changed. The niche is saturated. The market is dead. Somebody else came out of nowhere and took my sales. Maybe. But that is the one version of the story you can do nothing about.

Blame feels good for a day. Responsibility is the only version of the story you can actually fix.

The Details You Drop Once You Get Comfortable

Here is what actually got me. When you first learn to drive, you check every mirror, both directions, twice. You are slow and deliberate because they drilled into you how dangerous it is. Then you pass your test, and a year later you are eating a sandwich with one hand and changing the song with the other. You did not forget the details. You just got comfortable.

It is exactly the same in a business. The fundamentals you followed obsessively at the start, the ones that got you your first results, are the first things you quietly drop once money is coming in. The follow-up email you always sent. The numbers you used to check every week. The offer you tested before you launched it. The reply to every single customer. You stop doing them one by one, and nobody warns you, because nothing breaks the day you stop.

Getting comfortable is not the reward for doing the fundamentals. It is the exact moment you are most likely to abandon them.

In Business The Bill Arrives Quietly

On the road the consequence is instant. Half a second and you are on the ground, and you cannot possibly ignore it. In business the bill arrives slowly, and that is the real trap.

You skip the follow-up and nothing happens today. You stop watching your numbers and nothing happens this week. A lead goes cold. A few sales you would have closed just do not close. A small leak you would have caught on day one sits there quietly. No crash, no crutches, just a business that slowly underperforms while you tell yourself it is the market.

The fix is almost never a new strategy. It is going back to the boring details you already know and stopped doing. You do not need a clever new plan. You need to start running the old one properly again.

I got lucky. No torn ligament, just rest, physio, and a very clear reminder. So this week, look hard at your own business and find the one detail you used to be religious about and quietly let slide. That is probably the thing holding you back. Not the market, not the algorithm, not the other guy at the intersection.

The Daily AI Skills Running My Business While I Write to You

How to add them to yours in five minutes a day.

For 15 years I have been building businesses, running teams, and closing deals. Skills Black Magic is where I document every AI skill that has saved me hours, landed contracts, or uncovered leverage I did not know I had. Over 2,000 entrepreneurs read it every day.

And there is something brand new. Every single week I personally add a fresh money-making playbook to your membership. Each one takes a full course, the kind that would cost you weeks to work through, and compresses it into a few minutes of action you can run today and start getting results from. These are the exact blueprints I use to run a seven-figure business, written down step by step and included in your membership at no extra cost.

What's inside:

• Daily hand-picked AI skills: researched, tested in a real business generating seven figures, zero noise

• A brand-new money playbook every week: I personally add a fresh action-packed playbook that compresses a full course into minutes of action, included in your membership at no extra cost

• Five-minute installs: built for non-technical founders, no code needed, no PhD required

• Filtered by what you actually do: choose your business type and only see what is relevant to your goals

• Substack subscribers get VIP access: your subscription already covers the community fee, no extra cost

• Annual subscribers get the workshop too: the same training others paid $1,000 for, included at no extra charge

Here's what our members are saying:

“I have been running my business for 14 years and I thought I knew everything about productivity. Martin showed me three AI tools last month that cut my proposal time in half. I closed two extra deals because of the time I got back.” — David R., Agency founder

“Martin does not send you another video to watch or a PDF to file away. Every skill lands in my inbox ready to use before my second coffee. I added six new workflows in my first month.” — Sandra T., E-commerce consultant

Join Skills Black Magic Today

Over 2,000 entrepreneurs have added Skills Black Magic to their daily routine. They are not waiting for AI to get easier. They are already using it while everyone else is still watching explainer videos.

The Small Details That Actually Move Money

Join Skills Black Magic Today

Question: Which fundamental did you follow religiously at the start and quietly stop doing once things were working?

Leave a comment

— Martin

Build a life you don't need to escape from.

P.S. I spent two years posting every single day before I understood the difference between traffic you chase and traffic that compounds. Chased traffic vanishes the day you rest. 42 to 80k impressions on autopilot. Nobody teaches this because daily content keeps you dependent, and dependent people keep buying tools. The build notes for that compounding system live inside Traffic Automation Avalanche. Even if you never buy it, steal this: before you publish anything tomorrow, ask whether it will still bring visitors in six months. If the answer is no, you are on the treadmill. If you want off, the full case study is here.

Read the full case study →

The exact system I use to automate my business →

How I get free traffic and buyers on autopilot →

My journey: how I built a business that runs without me →